Not long ago the editor of the Fulton (N. Y.) Patriot made a big hit by getting a lot of the people who had moved away to write reminiscences of their early life in Fulton. Almost all of the writers were remembered by the home readers and the letters made much talk. Every error was pounced on and letters of correction started controversy. People involved in the talk were pleased. Members of the human family like to see their names in the newspapers.
But the editor should have ambitions and missions far beyond mere village gossip. The small towns of the Eastern states have become centers in which endless varieties of manufactured goods are turned out, and it is up to the editor to exploit every new thing connected with the raw material and with the making and the marketing of the product in which the community is interested. The middle-state towns are given largely to manufacturing on a larger scale, to coal and coke and oil industries, to steel, to the making of machinery. The editor should furnish all possible information. The South with its cotton, sugar, and tobacco is an especially interesting field for community specializing.
But greater than these is that vast industry spreading from the Atlantic to the Pacific in which one half of the nation’s population is interested because dependent on it—agriculture. Now, of the sixteen thousand weekly newspapers printed in the United States more than ten thousand are published in rural communities—in villages where the prosperity of doctors, lawyers, merchants, tradesmen, schools and churches depends on the prosperity of the farmer. Nearly every farmer takes a journal devoted to agriculture; but farming conditions vary greatly in different regions, and the village editor who can furnish real information to the farmer of his immediate neighborhood will perform the most valuable sort of community service. The average man is more interested in his business than in anything else. He delights to read about it.
The editor’s greatest concern should be to serve the interests of his parish. The people look to him for leadership and help. They want the community exploited. They want their share of everything going. They want the prices of their products kept up and their taxes kept down. They want good roads, good schools, good markets, attractive churches. And they appreciate an excellent newspaper. There are hundreds of villages and hamlets, especially in the South and in the West, that are far removed from any large city. Their inhabitants lose interest in the doings of the great outside world, but their own needs are sensed with no shallow understanding.
Village life throughout our country is taking on the attractions of intellectual uplift and refinement that long have been the pride and the boast of New England communities. The New England village, made attractive by its imitation of the beautiful village of Old England, has spread far across the continent. Poets and story tellers have idealized its shady streets, gilded its church spires and praised its intelligence with every felicity of language. It has its libraries, its study clubs, its improvement associations, its lecture courses, its high schools, its churches, its every facility for liberal education. Usually there is a college close at hand.
It is something of a fad at the moment for our young writers of novels to exaggerate the repulsive features of the American village, to magnify its unpleasant aspects, to ignore its excellences. But just as the measure of a man’s greatness should rest on his highest achievements rather than on his lowest, so should the beauty of a village be judged by its tidy lawns, its fragrant flower gardens, its artistic vistas of shaded streets, instead of by its back yards, its ash and garbage heaps, and its dumps for old tin cans. The degree of its intelligence and refinement should include the people of education and culture in the measurement as well as the louts, the clowns and the vulgar ignorant.
The modern village has many of the essential advantages possessed by the city: facilities for the development of intellectual life, for study, for personal ease and comfort, for the enjoyment of social life. You have a more wholesome existence; live a little nearer to nature; your friendships are finer and more lasting. Your very environment persuades to a greater appreciation of community comradeship.
Printing a newspaper here offers a fascinating and a fairly profitable career to the young man just quitting his studies. Electricity and gasoline have greatly increased the pleasures of village life, have literally transformed rural regions by giving quick communication with business and social and intellectual centers. Modern devices have bereft life there of much of its old-time drudgery. The people are wide awake. Their general intelligence is quite equal to the general intelligence of city people.
Likewise, the newspapers are much improved. Modern printing machinery and facilities have removed irksome processes. Editorial associations and the technical newspaper press have inspired to higher ideals. The business has become standardized on a higher plane of excellence. Many of our high schools and almost all of our colleges have courses in journalism. Their educational influences are reflected already in the country newspapers, especially in the West. The state universities of Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota, for instance, have sent hundreds of young men back to their villages to do journalistic work. The leaven of preparation is working wonders.
Moreover, success in village or small town journalism frequently leads to success in big cities. The editors of big city newspapers are overwhelmed with candidates for a place on the staff, but the applicants usually are unknown beginners, and they are rejected. But the village editor of real ability cannot hide his light; his good work attracts attention. The managers of the great journals seek men of superior quality and ask them to join the newspaper staff. Hundreds of the finest editors in this country started or matured on our rural newspapers. Good newspaper work, whether in city or country, attracts attention and is sure of reward.